


If Secretaries Wrote ST: TOS

by zakhad



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-09
Updated: 2018-02-09
Packaged: 2019-03-15 22:32:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13622868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zakhad/pseuds/zakhad
Summary: I actually wrote this, a long time ago, when I was a secretary.





	If Secretaries Wrote ST: TOS

Janice reached the bridge right on time with Captain Kirk's coffee and the day's roster. She walked carefully from the turbolift with the steaming hot brew, just the way he liked it, black with a spoon of sugar, and placed it neatly on the small area near the arm of his chair. When he looked up at her and took the roster, he smiled, but it wasn't one of his tickly warm ones, just the smile-for-the-sake-of-being-pleasant. That meant a busy day.

She hovered about waiting, but he didn't sign off on the roster right away. Didn't he realize how much work she had waiting for her? He seemed determined to talk endlessly with the navigator, about nothing really important -- just something that had been covered in an intraship memo she'd sent out on his behalf the day before. And damn it, he hadn't even read the memo himself! Half the details he mentioned were incorrect! Didn't he notice how the junior officers poked fun at him when he did that? Nothing like having him prove she worked for a moron. It only made her look like more of a sap for smiling pleasantly and professionally all the time.

Finally! He signed without even looking at it -- well, nothing new there. Janice left the bridge, and while riding to her tiny office without so much as a *simulated* viewport, nothing but drab walls, and Starfleet policy prevented her from decorating it with anything *personal* -- like putting a picture of her nephew on her desk would really *hurt* anything! -- she looked at the roster again.

Why did she always have to catch her own mistakes *after* he signed off? Why couldn't he look at the damn things and error-trap once in a while? It was the whole reason he was supposed to sign off! At least she'd found it before she posted it.

Doing up another roster, she forged the 'Cpn. J.T. Kirk' -- not hard, just make the C, the J, the T and the K real big and add a tiny zigzag -- and posted it. And filed it. And sat back with her own quite-cold coffee, and saw the note come up on her terminal asking her to send along a bouquet of flowers, whatever was appropriate, to that jiggly creature to whom he'd given a tour of the ship at the last starbase. Janice hated when he picked up another girlfriend. He always deluded himself into thinking he might visit again some time and that a few gifts and notes scattered over a couple of months might keep a bedroom door open for him in the future. All that really meant was the yeoman had to do the note-writing and gift-giving.

Well, down to business. Halfway through proofreading the last report he'd written, he called her asking for more coffee. So up she went. When she got back, she forged his signature on a requisition for a bridge coffee machine. She had better things to do, like making his correspondence look good. Stupid idiot couldn't spell -- how did he get out of the Academy? And why hadn't he given her whatever spellcheck software he'd used so he could graduate for Christmas last year instead of that stupid coaster set with the ship's insignia on them? Although they matched the previous year's coffee mug set and the antique pens from the year before that, she hated them with a passion simply because they showed just as much thought as the gifts he got his girlfriends.

Why not let her pick a gift for herself, since he expected her to get them for every other woman in his life? God knew she did everything else for the jerk. And for the crew -- she wished she knew how to put in surveillance equipment to prove that she was, in fact, the only one who ever cleaned out the break room. By the time she'd gotten the damned plomeek stains out of the carpet in there, she'd wanted to throw things at the first officer -- of course, no one would clean that up either, and she'd just wind up doing it.

She sighed, finished a mournful love note to the jiggly creature, and sent it, placing the usual order with Interstellar FTD, with the usual 'thanks Moira' -- she and Moira had a booming relationship. At least she and Moira communicated more regularly than she and the captain did. If he'd wanted a mind-reader, he should've gotten a Betazoid yeoman.

There was another report from engineering -- Scotty could be running a subroutine that randomly generated them, the numbers fluctuated all over the place, but still, Captain Jerk signed them off and patted the guy on the back for keeping the engines in good shape. And here was one from security, with the phrase 'you don't really read these, do you, Captain' repeated over and over within the text to pad it.

With a longing glance at the box of data chips under her desk, she went up to the bridge. Her correspondence course in computer science would wait until after hours -- she'd deliver the reports, as she was supposed to, and he'd sign them and hand them back, and keep staring at the viewscreen or yakking it up with Dr. McCoy, who, from what Chapel said, was just as bad with the paperwork.


End file.
